[todsul]

It's a totally different architecture. It's adding another layer. Why isn't it conceivable that adding this overhead would reduce speed?

Remember, I'm not comparing a Varnish cache to an un-cached site. I'm comparing cache vs cache. Nginx serves static files very quickly. And cached files, in this case, are static.

Also, these are single-server tests. Everything changes when you start talking about very large websites.